The murder of Angela Diniz, the subject of the miniseries that will premiere this Thursday (13th), is a very difficult case to explain, due to the fact that the victim has a very multifaceted and complex personality. Doca Street, who killed her in December 1976 with four bullets, three of them in the face, was given a symbolic sentence of 18 months in prison in 1979.
Lawyer Evaristo de Moraes Filho persuaded jurors to accept his claim of “just defense of honor,” and some in the courtroom praised him when he said the popular Minas Gerais socialite was “frivolous, outrageous, a high-class Babylonian prostitute, a girl who wanted to die.”
An example of the difficulty of summarizing this plot can be seen in the film Angela, directed by Hugo Plata, which will be released in September 2023 and available on Prime. The director decided to tell the story of Angela’s last four months with Doka, but that alone is not enough to understand the drama. Among several mistakes, the film ends with a long close-up of the killer’s face, with a sad expression on his face, rather than the victim’s.
The miniseries “Angela Diniz, Murdered and Condemned” goes further. Already from the title you can see the care taken to clarify the point of view of this story, written by Elena Soares and directed by Andrucha Waddington. The beginning of the first episode adds, “Angela was beautiful, free, and crazy. Or so they said. And in the ’70s, it was all dangerous.”
The HBO Max show follows Angela seeking explanations after she decided to leave her husband, a successful businessman she married at 17 and he was 31. “You know,[the marriage]hasn’t even started between us,” Angela says. They had three children, but the miniseries only features the couple and one girl. Simplifications regarding time frames and family size indicate that the Angela Dinis drama could not have been fully contained in six episodes of 45 minutes each.
The miniseries is loosely inspired by the Radio Novello podcast Praia dos Ossos presented by Blanca Viana, and written by Flora Thomson-Deveaux, Paula Scalpin, Aurelio de Arragán and Rafael Spinola.
The show, which consisted of eight episodes averaging 55 minutes, aired in 2020. “Praia dos Ossos” made a huge impact not only because of the drama it reported with its high-quality research and reporting, but also because of the way it told its story. Blanca Viana informs, gives opinions, alerts the listener to important details of the plot, and reveals the main character from different angles.
In Praia dos Ossos, the story begins with Angela’s childhood. It shows how she was “educated to seduce” by her mother, school, and the environment in which she lived. Unlike the miniseries, the podcast has all the characters named and contextualized, and is a compilation of the elites of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Before Doca, Angela dated columnist Ibrahim Soud, but it was a tense and dramatic relationship, not a smooth one, as shown in the series.
Starring the outstanding Marjorie Estiano, with a great cast and excellent period recreation, this miniseries tells a deeply sad story in a very engaging way, but it doesn’t reach the density of a podcast.
Blanca Viana’s point is worth remembering. “The murder of Angela Diniz was not the result of an isolated incident in which a man acted out of control due to a momentary impulse due to his girlfriend’s temperament. It was the reaction of the average man of the time, brought up in the values of the time and molded to fear women who followed his desires. He was therefore made to act violently when he encountered such women.”
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